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Recent months have unearthed a wealth of computing and coding talent amongst Irish school kids with their hearts set on disrupting the technology world. The latest is a computing prodigy who at the age of six did his first Linux install.

Dublin schoolkid Shane Curran, age 11, admits his obsession with computers began when was six, when he did his first Linux install. When he was 7 he learned how to programme in Visual Basic and built a simple web browser that he made available on the web for download.

The process to introduce an official code of conduct for Linux Australia events is continuing, with the Linux Australia council today issuing a re-drafted code for the consideration of members, including a proposed new warning system for inappropriate speakers.

The new draft of the code once again sets out how attendees and presenters should conduct themselves at Linux Australia events, strongly emphasising appropriate, all-ages conduct at all times.

Server

Serviceguard for Linux: This is a big win for Linux users on HP, and removes a major operational and architectural hurdle for HP-UX migrations. ServiceGuard is a highly regarded clustering and HA facility on HP-UX, and includes many features for local and geographically distributed HA.

Graphics Stack

Earlier this month I showed the Intel graphics performance hasn’t improved much in the Linux 3.2 kernel (but there might be a boost when RC6 is flipped on), but how is this new kernel shaping up for NVIDIA hardware owners wishing to use the open-source and reverse-engineered Nouveau driver? In this article are some benchmarks of the Nouveau DRM driver from recent Linux releases.

Applications

Linux and Windows. It’s like comparing Apples and Oranges. Software can be compared, but how do you do so fairly and honestly? And what sort of presumptions should I make concerning where the reader of this article stands? I presume you are among the “rare” Linux users.

Not easy at all. Let’s start of with where I come from. I use Linux because I really prefer the stability and security of the platform. My system’s performance is better.. Hands down Linux is much better than any flavor of Windows in those three categories. But then there’s the software issue.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

The search for a location for the KDE annual world summit Akademy 2012 is over. Tallinn, Estonia will be the venue for the event which will run from 30 June to 6 July 2012, according to the announcement by KDE e.V. The conference is jointly organised by the KDE e.V. and the host, the Estonian Information Technology College, which is located near to the Tehnopol Science and Business Park.

Softpedia is once again the first to announce that the KDE team proudly released a few minutes ago, November 24th, the first Beta version of the upcoming and renewed KDE Software Compilation 4.8 environment.

The KDE Community has released a first beta of version 4.8 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). Aimed at testers, the development preview of the next major update to the open source K Desktop Environment brings changes to the Plasma Workspaces, applications and underlying platform, as well as various performance and stability improvements.

GNOME Desktop

Dave Neary was at college in his native Ireland in the mid 1990s when he discovered free software. He had “managed to get through a maths degree doing very little programming”, and went on to do a research degree in image analysis where the ability to program became an essential part of his work. He remembers “turning to a friend and saying: ‘I understand that these things are variables but what’s the star thing in front of the variable name?’ When he stopped laughing he told me, and that’s how I discovered pointers.”

“The piece of software I was working on would only compile on UNIX so I ran an X-Server on my Windows desktop until somebody said ‘You’re not using Windows. Why don’t you just install Linux and be done with it?’, and I had to say ‘Linux, what’s that?’”

This was in 1996. By 1999 he had taken a job as a developer with Informix which left him in something of a rut “where I was wanting to learn more than I was learning through my job. So I began to work on The Gimp. I hadn’t worked on user interface software before,” he says, “and started looking at bugs that were annoying me, scratching my itch, and got heavily involved in Gimp development.”

“The great thing about the free software world in general and also my upbringing is that I haven’t been afraid to take things apart just to see how they work. I’m not afraid to get inside the hood and see what’s going on even if I don’t know what I am doing.”

He went on to become release manager for The Gimp and a member of the board of the GNOME Foundation, and later advised Nokia and Intel on community aspects of the Maemo and Meego projects.

The GNOME Project announced a few minuntes ago, November 24th, the immediate availability for testing of the second development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment, which brings assorted fixes and improvements.

Red Hat Family

Polaris Financial Technology Ltd. (POLS.BO), a leading global Financial Technology company, was awarded the Best Independent Software Vendor (ISV) title in the Middleware segment at the Red Hat APAC Fiscal Year 2012 Partner and Technical Conference held in Macau in October 2011. Polaris was the only winner in this category and one of two award winners from India.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

In April 2012 Canonical will release the latest version of Ubuntu, this time known as Precise Pangolin.

The new release will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release so will likely be more conservative than other releases and consolidate on the many changes over the past year. LTS releases are supported for five years.

Linux Mint appears to be soaring in popularity at the expense of high-profile distros such as Ubuntu, figures from DistroWatch have suggested.

The site’s latest page hit numbers show a sharp decline in the last month for Ubuntu, which having occupied second spot throughout year has now dropped to fourth place, behind even Fedora, openSUSE and top performer, Mint.

Flavours and Variants

The Ubuntu Linux distribution appears to be suffering in popularity following the consumer-focused desktop OS switch to the new Unity desktop.

If the figures on DistroWatch.com are to be believed then Linux fans have been deserting Ubuntu in droves, following the adoption of the controversial new desktop scheme.

Mint has powered ahead in popularity, now over double the ‘average number of hits per day’ than Ubuntu and with traditionally lower ranged Fedora and OpenSUSE leapfrogging Ubuntu into second and third places respectively.

On Monday, the Linux Distribution popularity tracker of Distrowatch updates showed that Canonical’s Ubuntu went down to fourth position and at the same time Linux Mint is increasing their lead at the topmost position.

According to records, for more than a couple of years Ubuntu secured the top position in the popularity list of Distrowatch but, over the last year its position slipped to second spot and now it is ranked in fourth position, reported Distrowatch.

After awakening from a Thanksgiving-induced food coma — actually, it wasn’t that bad — most of the daily articles about Linux posted this morning by our friends in Mountain View known as Google revolved around the fact that Ubuntu is dropping like a lead zeppelin in the Distrowatch standings, while Linux Mint is surging.

Softpedia is the first to announce that Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, unleashed a couple of minutes ago, November 23rd, the new and highly anticipated Linux Mint 12 operating system, dubbed Lisa.

There’s no official announcement on the Linux Mint website, yet the ISO images for Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) are aready available on the official Linux Mint mirrors.

Phones

Android

Earlier this week I misplaced my beloved Samsung Nexus S. I only realized when arriving at home my Android device was missing. After a frantic backtracking of the places I had visited just before, the phone was nowhere to be found. Every time I tried to dial the phone I heard it ringing but no one picked it up. I suddenly found myself in great distress as I very much live by my Android phone.

There are several apps for locating a lost Android device. However, they require you to have had the foresight to install the app before the phone is lost which – to my regret – I had not done. So my chance of recovery was looking ever slimmer.

I am quite optimistic about the next 25 years of IT in New Zealand because, in recent months, I have got the sense that a number of auspicious trends are starting to converge.

The new digital-native generation is starting get socially and politically involved in meaningful ways. For these young folk the internet is inextricably woven into their day to day social fabric.

Their experience means they have some different priorities from earlier generations. Their influence seems to be quietly ushering in a new culture: one in which the opposite of open isn’t closed; this opposite of open is broken.

Last night, as I tried (and failed) to duck around raindrops on my way down Manhattan’s West 34th Street, I noticed something I hadn’t before: on the curbside bus stop, in blazing orange LED bulbs, were the times for the next city buses to arrive.

1. Headquarted in Columbia, Maryland, Sourcefire was founded in January 2001 by Martin Roesch, author of open-source intrusion detection system Snort.

2. Snort is the world’s most widely-deployed intrusion detection and prevention technology, with nearly 4 million downloads to date.

3. In addition to Snort, Sourcefire manages some of the industry’s most respected open source security projects, including ClamAV, the most commonly used open source anti-virus and anti-malware gateway product in the world, as well as Razorback.

The recent arrest of Jose Pimentel, a 27-year-old convert to Islam who was allegedly planning to detonate an explosive device in New York, underscores the ongoing danger posed by so-called “lone wolf” terrorists. Pimentel, busy preparing a bomb at the time of his arrest according to prosecutors, is alleged to have wanted to kill American troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. The real significance of his plot, however, lies in the method he was using.

In an attempt to raise the profile of worthwhile science education projects, Science magazine has started handing out the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education, or SPORE. This week’s award is going to a project called Open Source Physics. Started by a group of college professors, the site offers simulation software on a wide variety of topics in the physical sciences (including astronomy), accompanied by guides and lesson plans that help integrate it into the classroom.

Events

SaaS

The storage is one of the favorite services offered by the Cloud: 76% of the sample interviewed is in favor of the storage of information in the Cloud, and consider the whole service a support in the work sphere (58%), in the education (38%), for social life (30%), for hobby sharing (21%) and to know new people (11%).

I’m back again at my daily job after a week travelling between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. It’s clear that the hot topics there are cloud and flash storage; in fact the first meeting I had last week in Silicon Valley was with OpenStack.

Hadoop gets plenty of attention from investors and the IT press, but it’s very possible we haven’t seen anything yet. All the action of the last year has just set the stage for what should be a big year full of new companies, new users and new techniques for analyzing big data. That’s not to say there isn’t room for alternative platforms, but with even Microsoft abandoning its competitive effort and pinning its big data hopes on Hadoop, it’s difficult to see the project’s growth slowing down.

Databases

So to recap, CouchDB doesn’t scale enough and it’s also too big for smaller devices. CouchBase, one of the leading commercial sponsors behind CouchDB should be plenty worried.

To be fair, Ubuntu leaving an upstream project for their own needs is nothing new. You need to look no further than Mark Shuttleworth’s split from GNOME 3 with the Unity interface. The difference this time around though, is it’s not just the community that Ubuntu is splitting from, but the commercial relationship too. It’s one thing to have dis-agreements within an open source community, it’s another not to be able to get a commercial vendor to help tailor a solution that will work.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

The accessibility checker works by finding issues in documents that make it hard or, at times, impossible for people with disabilities to read. These issues include insufficient colour contrast between text and background, missing alternative text for images and other objects, missing language identification, and the incorrect use of heading styles.

CMS

Packt has today announced a new subscription on PacktLib for Joomla! developers. Housing 26 books, this library will enable Joomla! developers to get up and running quickly, as well as extend their skills and knowledge to become serious professionals. Recently announced as the winner of the best 2011 Open Source CMS, a resurgent Joomla!, now with a six month development cycle, has proved itself to be one of the leading open source content management systems on the market.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.

Project Releases

The MyPaint developers have announced the availability of version 1.0.0 of their open source graphics-tablet-oriented digital painting application. The raster graphics editing software, which runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, began development in 2005 and has focused on being able to respond to pen pressure when drawing, while having a simple, minimalistic user interface that is hidden until the user needs it. It offers extensive brush creation and configuration options for the artist, basic layer support and an “unlimited canvas” which avoids the need for resizing.

Google has now set specific dates for the shutdown of Google Wave, the collaboration service it launched in May 2009 and officially abandoned in August 2010. It has been informing users by email that from 31 January 2012, it will mark all waves, the equivalent of a conversation or thread on the service, as read only. On 30 April 2012, the service will be turned off entirely. Google is directing users who are interested in continuing to work with Wave or a similar collaborative tools to look at open source projects.

Public Services/Government

A group of organisations and interested persons from Romania are addressing an open letter to the Romanian Ministry for Culture and Patrimony about the Romanian cultural patrimony on the Internet, which can be published at Europeana.eu, where our country was to submit 789,000 works until 2015 and currently has managed to publish less than 36,000. We ask about the status of this project and propose the use of the images contributed in the recent Romanian Wikipedia photography contest. The full text can be read on the ProLinux website or in printable format (along with the signatures list) from the APTI blog.

Openness/Sharing

Scientists routinely use computer modeling and computation in innovative research, including predicting the nature of He4 at extremely low temperatures and the impact of human activity on climate. Why does computer-based modeling remain absent from many educational programs?

The Open Source Physics (OSP) project, www.compadre.org/osp/, seeks to enhance computational physics education by providing a central Web site containing computer modeling tools, simulations, curricular resources such as lesson plans, and a computational physics textbook that explains the pedagogic simulations’ algorithms (1). Our resources are based on small single-concept simulations packaged with source codes that can be examined, modified, recompiled, and freely redistributed to teach fundamental computational skills. Students at all levels will benefit from these interactive simulations by learning to question and assess the simulation’s assumptions and output.

Open Hardware

Programming

Canadian dynamic language company ActiveState has said that that after its beta stage is completed, its Stackato Micro Cloud will continue to be free of charge for developers to use as their own private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution on a single node. ActiveState’s products all leverage community-driven open source projects, so with Stackato access assured, developers can build, test, and deploy applications on a micro cloud for free.

The R programming language, a software environment designed especially for statistical computations and graphing, will now be able to process 64-bit integer types. A patch to enable this capability, from French R developer Romain François, is available to download from the CRAN server network. His approach involves storing int64 vectors in R as pairs of 32-bit integers in S4 objects, with one holding the high order bits and the other the low order bits. Behind the scenes, the arithmetic operations are carried out in high performance C++ code; François has modified almost all of the standard arithmetic operations available in R to transparently work with the new class.

ONLINE RETAILER Clove will start shipping a SIM-free Nokia Lumia 800 handset to people who want it at the start of December.

Thus far Nokia’s first Windows Phone 7.5 handset is available from only three firms on a SIM-free basis – Carphone Warehouse, Phones4u and Expansys – and this is the source of some disappointment, says Clove, because apparently there are people out there who want to pay the best part of £500 for the handset.

US lawmakers have launched an investigation into the threat of cyber espionage from Chinese telecoms firms operating in the US, singling out Huawei and ZTE.

The House of Representatives committee on intelligence said yesterday that it was focused on the threat to America’s security and critical infrastructure coming from “the expansion of Chinese-owned telecommunications companies – including Huawei and ZTE – into our telecommunications infrastructure”.

Security

Finance

Goldman Sachs, the most notorious investment bank on Wall Street, has two things in common with the legislators with significant investments in the company: wealth and power.

According to research by the Center for Responsive Politics, 19 current members of Congress reported holdings in Goldman Sachs during 2010. Whether by coincidence or not, most of these 19 Goldman Sachs investors in Congress are more powerful or more wealthy than their peers, or both.

Goldman Sachs Inc., the global investment bank and financial services firm, announced this morning that it is running for president of the United States. The announcement was made at a farm near Waterloo, Iowa by the musician Ted Nugent, who was hired to speak for the candidate. “We love oil and God and gasoline!” shouted Mr. Nugent, as he held aloft two semi-automatic machine guns and a sleeve of red, white and blue painted grenades. “And we hate them people who don’t look American and drive those weird tiny cars and use big words!” Mr. Nugent kept his remarks brief and did not mention the candidate, Goldman Sachs, by name. At the end of his speech, the outspoken musician fired off several rounds of live ammunition, screamed “Let’s go eat a live bear!” and then charged into the woods with the frenzied crowd following behind.

Censorship

The European Court of Justice has ruled that ISPs do not have the right to filter out copyright-infringed content from the web, marking a massive win for privacy evangelists and a huge loss for the movie and record industry.

Microsoft's charm offensives against Free/libre software are proving to be rather effective, despite them involving a gross distortion of facts and exploitation of corruptible elements in the corporate media

A British MEP criticises Battistelli and the management of the European Patent Office (EPO) while Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe, UK Minister for Intellectual Property, gets closer to Battistelli in a tactless effort to improve relations